US PLANS TO CRACK DOWN ON VPN SERVICE PROVIDERS

Mon 18 July 2022:

US lawmakers have asked the FTC, led by Lina Khan, to investigate abusive and deceptive data practices by hundreds of companies that provide Virtual Private Network (VPN) services to individuals.

A VPN is an online service that claims to provide users with increased security when connecting to the Internet.

According to the lawmakers, however, the consumer VPN industry is riddled with deceptive advertising and abusive data practices.

The letter by Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) describe several abusive practices in the consumer VPN industry, including promoting false and misleading claims about their services, selling user data and providing user activity logs to law enforcement, despite promises of ‘total anonymity,’ and a lack of oversight of the industry in general.

“We urge you to use your authority to take enforcement actions against the problematic actors in the consumer VPN industry, focusing particularly on those that engage in deceptive advertising and data collection practices,” they said.

The VPN industry is extremely opaque, and many VPN providers exploit, mislead, and take advantage of unwitting consumers, the lawmakers added.

The US lawmakers said it is extremely difficult for someone to decipher which VPN service to trust, especially for those in crisis situations.

“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of VPN services available to download, yet there is a lack of practical tools or independent research to audit VPN providers’ security claims,” the letter read.

Advocacy groups have also found that leading VPN services intentionally misrepresent the functionality of their product and fail to provide adequate security to their users.

“VPN services have also been exposed for collecting, and, in some cases, abusing, user data. In 2020 it was revealed that a leading analytics firm used personal data from over 35 million people who had downloaded one of their 20 VPN and ad-blocking apps to power their analytics platform without consent,” the letter said.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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